From Africa to Academic Walk: The Spiritan Charism and the Student Experience
At the 2012 Founder’s Week activities, Luci-Jo DiMaggio, assistant director of Spiritan Campus Ministry, discussed how students live out the mission of our founding Spiritan congregation. These are excerpts from her remarks:
If you ask any student who knows a Spiritan, most would tell you that the Spiritans love to tell stories. Very often, these stories are of time spent working in missions in Africa, South America, even places around the U.S. But of our 10,000 or so students, very, very few will ever spend time at a Spiritan mission. So how do they take this Spiritan charism and tradition that is steeped in work in distant places and developing areas, and translate and integrate the tradition into their daily lives on campus?
Actually, they do it quite well. I’d like to share three stories that get at the heart of how our students take the teachings of Libermann and Des Places and the work of the earliest Spiritan missionaries and live it out each day.
A few semesters ago, Kim Daley studied in Ghana. A senior chemistry student involved in a wide range of activities like working with our campus environmental group and fair trade activities, Kim was involved two years ago in the pilot program of the Laval Project. This group looks at non-violent social change in the context of the Hill District and focuses on educating students before they do any hands-on work in the community. In fact, they only do community outreach on the very last day of the program.
We reviewed the process, and I asked Kim, “Does this idea that we spend the entire semester learning and not doing things in the community until the end make sense to you?” Kim’s response was, “That’s just what we do right? We learn first, think about it, make friends in the neighborhood and then work with them.” In that one sentence, Kim had summed up the Spiritan approach to working in community.
This Spiritan idea is how Fr. Francis Libermann had instructed the first missionaries to Africa. Once Kim and our other students hear it, they embrace entering into new experiences in a relational way.
Kate Lecci went on the cross-cultural mission experience to the Dominican Republic last year as the Spiritan Campus Ministry staff leader. Before Kate worked at Duquesne, she was a student here and went to the Dominican mission when she was a sophomore. We ran a summer camp for young children side-by-side with the teens of the community. We had planned for 60 students and got 90 6- to 10-year olds the first morning, starting a week of organized chaos. On the third or fourth day of the camp, Fr. Don McEachin, the American Spiritan at the mission, offered to take us swimming. But we needed to make lunches, clean up and reflect on the day. He came to pick us up and Kate explained that we still needed to finish cleaning and hadn’t yet started our afternoon prayer and reflection; it would be at least another 45 minutes. Don simply said, “Can’t you pray and reflect while you’re cleaning?”
So we filled water jugs as we shared about our day, swept the floors while someone shared about Jesus and “the other,” and packed the lunch bags while a student talked about being moved by the expression of the faith of the local teens. Reflection and cleaning wove themselves together as if they were always supposed to be part of the same garment. Later, Kate told me, “I like the part where we can talk and clean and laugh and pray all at the same time. It makes faith so much more a part of everything we do, not just the church part of what we do.”
There it was, so simply stated, a perfect articulation of Practical Union, the idea that we are not just close to God at times of prayer or during the celebration of the Eucharist, but that God is in everything we do, every action, every thought, whether our hands are folded in prayer or scrubbing pots. While we want our students to take some quiet time in prayer, it gives me hope that when they leave here, they will value all they do as prayer, recognizing that they are surrounded by the Divine at all times.
I have one more story: I met Adam Wasilko, the resident director of St. Ann’s Hall, when he was the graduate assistant of Assumption Hall. He had spent two years as a resident assistant and worked very hard to build a good community.
Somewhere along the line, Adam found a copy of Francis Libermann’s Spiritual Letters and scanned the entire 600-page book so he could print me an extra copy. The next day, Adam came into my office carrying his copy of the Spiritual Letters and asked, “Did you read this? I was up half the night with it! This is great stuff! Libermann wrote an entire manual on how to be a good resident assistant!”
Adam told how all pieces written for the early missionaries—about knowing your community and living with them, being invited in instead of forcing yourself on them, meeting their needs as articulated by them not doing what you felt they needed—were exactly what you needed to know to be a good RA.
I had always seen the kinds of things he was talking about as advice for those strictly in the missions. Adam saw it exactly as it applied to his own life. This is how I think our students live out the Spiritan charism: they make it their own.
They take what we all share with them and apply it to their lives in this culture, as the Holy Spirit is guiding them each day.
So from Africa to Academic Walk, our students are living out this charism, born of ministry to chimney sweeps and missionaries in a foreign land, made real by 18- to 22-year-olds living right here in Pittsburgh.